Captured- A Tale of Samus Aran
by Byronofsidius
Summary: The Wrecking Crew, one of countless gangs at work in the universe, comes across what appears to be a crippled vessel while traversing a sparsely populated system. Upon closer inspection, they come to discover the unnamed ship is registered to the legendary bounty hunter, Samus Aran! Once captured, can the outlaws keep her contained? Find out in 'Captured- A Tale of Samus Aran!
1. Chapter 1

Part 1

The Big Empty stretched on before them on the viewscreen for as far as they could see, an unknown expanse of darkness interrupted periodically by distant stars and shifting blots of color, planets that had either not yet been inhabited by another spacefaring race, or that had simply been uncontacted. To the Wrecking Crew, it didn't really matter which they were; if the place didn't ping their system as a friendly port to their outfit, they just drifted on by.

The bridge of their vessel, 'The Dozer', had been constructed after an ancient Chozo design referred to as 'The Meritocrat Style', with the ship's commanding officer elevated slightly above all other stations by a ramp and outpost, giving them an unobstructed view of the screen. A circular array of panels and screens was available to whomever sat or stood at this console, and at the moment, Molly Mash held the seat. She had held the seat now for six years, since disposing of the Crew's previous captain, a withering old outlaw who simply didn't have what it took to get the job done anymore.

She shifted aimlessly in her swiveling chair, the creak of her old-fashioned leather jacket the only sound on the bridge aside from Driver's instruments almost directly below her. The melchin pilot tapped away with his slender, amphibian-like padded fingers on his panels, shifting the viewport's perspective from one set of scanners to the next, until a full sweep had been displayed, bringing them back to the forward viewers.

"Not much out there, captain," he reported in his wet, slurping voice.

"I can see that, Driver," Molly replied with a sigh. "Has Wrench finished modifying our long-range sensors yet?"

"She told me she finished that up a couple of days ago, captain," Driver said from below. "But she didn't want me to use them until you gave the go-ahead." Molly snorted, her right foot twitching and bouncing as she balanced the leg on her left knee, her usual posture of boredom.

"Well for shit's sake, you little toad, fire them up," she crowed, tapping on her own sweep panel. Driver tapped away on the lower section of the bridge, and a few moments later, there came an audible trill from the bridge's automated alert system.

"WARNING- VESSEL DETECTED," droned the pseudo-female voice of the ship's computer system. "WARNING- VESSEL DETECTED." Molly shot up out of her chair, pushing it back with her thighs as she leaned over her control board.

"Driver, bring it up on screen," she barked, reaching for the All-Comms button on her left-most panel. "Attention Crew, this is your captain speaking. We have an unidentified vessel on long-range sensors. I want everybody to their posts, now," she said evenly, killing the All-Comms and shifting to her right to watch the automatic doors from the primary corridor.

The first one through the door, half a minute later, was Rivet, of course. A member of the Mosow race, he resembled a First Earth minotaur from their faery tales and fantasy games of old, wearing a blood red single-piece jumpsuit over his massive frame. Unlike those brutes of legend, however, the Mosows hosted only one horn on their head; males on the left, females on the right.

Rivet stomped four paces onto the bridge, turned and stared straight up at the captain. "A vessel," he grunted. Molly nodded and pointed at the viewscreen, which was zooming in on an unfamiliar ship. Vaguely yellowish in hue on the exterior, it had a kind of beetle-like shape to it, and at a glance, appeared to have seen better days. Even at this distance, Molly could spot signs of recent ship-to-ship combat, wherein this contender clearly didn't come away completely clean. "Does that thing even have any exterior weaponry," a new voice asked. Molly peeked down and spotted Hammer, their resident weapons expert. A member of the Cathus race, he was a vaguely humanoid cat-person with faint blue fur where visible where he wasn't wearing black transteel body armor. His gear belt was littered with various firearms and melee weapons, and the legs of his cargo pants appeared to have been modified and weighed down with more armor plating and tools. How the cathus could even move in that getup, she couldn't tell.

"We'll be able to see it better if we move in on it," Driver said. "Do you want us to bear in, captain?"

"Bring up shields to three-quarters force and bear in, half speed until we're on a ten unit distance, then hold," she said, dragging her seat back over and sitting down as the others took up seats around the bridge. Rivet, of course, headed to the security and defense systems control, which hosted more fine-tuned options than Molly's small section, which gave her access to only basic functions. That was the trade-off for the Meritocrat Style of bridge design; while she had access to all of the ship's most basic functions, anything that required a more finessed touch was accessible only to those specific system stations without the primary architect code.

Given that the Wrecking Crew had stolen the Dozer in the first place, nobody had ever known that code to begin with.

As the ship drew closer to the unidentified vessel, Hammer prepped the offensive systems, while Driver changed the viewer display from the long-range sensors to the mid-range ones, the image now further away but clearer. As they closed on the other vessel, it became clear that it did, in fact, have exterior weapons system. Or, rather, had once possessed them. Carbon scoring and rents along the shell of the ship showed Molly that whoever's ship it was, they'd had their weapons specifically targeted by whoever they'd been fighting against.

A smart move, she thought. Whoever's on that ship, if they're still alive, might well be trying to get out of the way of some serious heat. "Driver, run a systems check on that ship as soon as we're stopped," Molly said.

"It's kind of familiar, captain," Rivet said below, at the security/defense station console. His eyes were narrowed on the viewport, head slightly tilted to the side. "I could swear I've seen it before, just not sure where." Driver, meanwhile, was dipping and diving through available infonets the Dozer could connect to in this sector, the information packets sending out and coming back more slowly than normal, since they were in the largely uninhabited Feldar System. The Dozer came to a halt as they came to within a couple of unit's distance with the other ship, and the other boys started to work on their own information readouts.

"Scans for capabilities show that the other vessel has suffered severe damage to its weapons and defense systems," said Hammer.

"Life-support systems are operating at approximately fifty-percent capacity," Rivet reported. "There appears to be only a single lifeform aboard. Whatever it is, it is shielded from genetic scan outputs, captain," he grunted, slapping his console like a fool. "It's giving off some kind of strange feedback."

"What about propulsion," Molly asked. Rivet looked up at her and shook his head.

"It's core isn't damaged, but sensors do not detect any active charge blocks, only discharged ones. Whoever they are, they're out of fuel, ma'am," he replied.

"Captain," Driver yipped below her. All eyes turned toward him down there, hidden from her direct view thanks to the ramp leading from the bridge door to her console. "We've got something, and it's big!"

"Report, Driver," she snapped.

"Captain, that vessel has no name on its own, but you're not gonna believe who it's registered to!"

"Spill it, you slimy little whelp, or I'll have Carl cut your legs up and serve them to us as a delicacy," she barked.

"Captain, that ship is registered to the bounty hunter Samus Aran!"


	2. Chapter 2

Well, shit, Molly thought as she strapped on her torso armor, checking each seal to ensure that she was as covered as she could be. How the mighty have fallen. Like any organized criminal, she'd heard of Aran, mostly through word-of-mouth among her and the Crew's peers. Some of her own footsoldiers had served in smaller outfits that the bounty hunter had taken down and broken apart over the years, carving a path through them like they were little more than grass twitching in the wind.

"Couple of things you should know about Aran, captain," said Hammer, handing Molly a balanced ion blaster pistol, which she holstered while the others in their boarding party continued their own preparations. "She's a Svestri, first of all, second-generation. That means sonic weapons aren't going to work, and she's faster and stronger than she might look. That's if she's not wearing that fucking powered suit of hers," the cathus grumbled, looking over at Digger. Digger, who had for a while been their primary mechanic, was a narrow human with a complexion so pale he could be mistaken for a walking sheet of paper, and eyes more sunken than an ancient Earth pirate ship taken down by a superior naval power. "Digger, where's your armor," Hammer asked.

"I got it, I got it," the former mechanic said nasally, grabbing his own armor off of the gear racks and shifting into it. Molly noted that the man wasn't exactly going through the motions like he was supposed to, half-assing his preparations.

"Anything else we should know about Aran, or about these, what did you call her," Molly asked.

"Svestri," said Hammer. "They're very rare, only a couple dozen of them across the known systems. The current generation are the offspring of genetic experiments, and no two are exactly alike in terms of capabilities. But they share some common traits," said the cathus. "Enhanced speed and strength, like I said, and an immunity to sonic weaponry. They also seem to heal from injury quicker than most folks. Now, anything else, I'm not sure of, because those are the only things that seem universal among all of them."

"Understood," said Molly as the Dozer rocked a little. The docking clamp had fixed into position, meaning that soon, they would be rushing the gunship to see if they could take Aran down without destroying her ship at range. "Wrench, can you tell us anything about her power suit?" Molly, Digger, Hammer and Rivet all turned their attention to the petite, curly-haired redhead in her grimy olive green coveralls, a small datapad in her hand, virtual goggles strapped over her eyes. She smiled at them nervously, and Molly wondered, briefly, if Wrench's freckles flared more redly when she felt put upon, or if that was merely a trick of the light in the docking set chamber.

"It's a Mark IV Adams-Nelling Power Armor, but heavily modified by the user," Wrench began. "The blast plating makes the user immune to most small-arms fire, but needlers can still slip through the connector gaps in the plating. The arm cannon's primary firing mode is a kinetic fusion orb, which fires more slowly than the standard blaster, but can cut through most light armor with no problem. You guys'll be fine, though, since Hammer augmented your armor vests with diffuser plates."

"You're welcome," the cathus said with a nod at his comrades.

"And remember to be on the lookout if the arm cannon's tip changes outward appearance," Wrench cautioned. "Users can input all kinds of variations of firing capability, and each one is signaled by an outer shift in appearance of the cannon's tip. One last thing, captain," Wrench said. Molly rolled her eyes, sensing what was coming by taking one look in the mechanic's big doe eyes. "I think this is a bad idea."

"Wrench, honey, we're going to be just fine," Molly said, waving the others toward the panel door on their end of the docking tube. She stepped up to Wrench and put her hands on the mechanic's hips, giving them a light squeeze. "I'll be right back to you, okay?" Wrench looked down demurely, peeping up and grinning.

"Okay." She gave Molly a quick kiss for luck, and the captain of the Wrecking Crew followed after the others, ready to deal with Samus Aran. Or so she hoped.

Rivet had been a soldier for the Petari Empire in his youth, a sergeant leading teams of headstrong, war-cry shouting barbarians into the fray dozens of times. He had lost plenty of men, and killed more than his fair share before the Empire's collapse and his own flight to what passed for more 'civilized' systems. Most folks he'd come across were soft things, even among this organization he'd signed on with eventually.

Something he'd encountered on several occasions, both as a soldier and as the unnamed head of security forces for the Wrecking Crew, was the takeover of an enemy vessel once it was crippled. The encounters never varied much; the docking tube would secure from his own ship to the enemy's, he'd lead a boarding party over, they'd lose a scout who got too eager and jumped ahead, and then they would swarm the victims with overwhelming force. It was ever the same, becoming routine.

This, however, was anything but routine. Not only was he not in charge of the boarding party, but the 'victim', if ever such a word could be assigned to Samus Aran, was not apparently content to try hunkering down in her own damaged ship. When they were still twenty yards away in the low-gravity docking tube, Aran's docking door whooshed open, and several shipping containers came floating out toward them.

"What the fu-," he managed before something came out right behind the crates, something that looked more machine than man. Twisting in sync with the crates she'd hoisted into the tube, the bounty hunter took careful aim from behind her bizarre cover, and opened fire on the group, three rapid shots. One of the blob-like bullets whizzed by them, narrowly missing all members of the Crew, but the second shot glanced Hammer's vest, tossing him back toward the Dozer with a grunt, and the third one pelted Digger, who was closest to Aran, pushing him back into Molly in a tangle of arms and legs.

Rivet holstered his own blaster pistol and took out the ion blaster, taking careful aim at the crates. He only needed one good shot to disrupt the bounty hunter, but Aran's movements were now masked by both the crates and Molly and Digger, who were trying to push off of one another. Digger ended up propelling himself toward Aran's end of the tube, firing blindly at the bounty hunter.

"Digger, don't," Hammer shouted, but too late. Aran popped out of cover for just a moment, long enough for Rivet to see that, like Wrench had warned, the end of her suit's arm cannon had changed shape. Digger, confident that his armor would hold up still, tried to plant his feet and take a shot, which ended up being absorbed with a fluctuation of light by Aran's armor.

Her own pencil-thin beam of crimson energy, fired from an angled tip at the end of the cannon, didn't hit Digger's vest at all; instead, it pushed a solid cylinder of flesh, brain and bone right out the back of the former mechanic's head. The man was dead before he could even drift to the tube floor in the low gravity, blood and cerebral fluids streaking into the air between Aran and the Crew.

"Fuck this," Hammer shouted, throwing something toward the bounty hunter and propelling himself back toward the Dozer, grabbing Molly by the arm as he drifted and dragging her along with. Rivet, taking the hint, also pushed himself away, and a moment later, there erupted a sound like thunder, accompanied by the expansion of a black cloud limned with crackling green energy. When the visual effect ended. Samus Aran could be seen drifting toward them, her body limp in her armor.

"Well why the hell didn't you use that first thing," Molly barked, slapping Hammer on the arm.

"Ouch, knock it off, captain," he whined, rubbing her exposed upper arm. "I forgot I had one on me, I panicked when she came out at us. Who the fuck does that, anyway," he asked. Rivet stomped toward the bounty hunter's limp form, grabbing it by the cannon arm and pulling it along behind him, the end of the weapon carefully tucked through so that the end couldn't fire on him if she should wake up.

"She does," he grunted, leading the way back aboard the Dozer.


End file.
